Locals called the area ‘La Cività’; a clue, perhaps. Antiquarian Lucas Holstenius proposed it as the site of Pompeii as early as 1637. But formal excavations didn’t begin until 1748.
The site wasn’t regarded as interesting or valuable in itself, but merely a sources of decorative antiquities for Charles VII, king of Naples. This wasn’t excavating so much as mining for art. Work was carried out under the direction of statesman Bernardo Tanucci. Beneath him were two military engineers, Roque Joaquin de Alcubierre and Karl Weber, together with Camillo Paderni, Charles VII’s curator.
Once artworks had been removed, excavations were backfilled. Pottery, considered superfluous, was smashed. Paderni ordered all duplicate paintings destroyed: an object’s uniqueness was one of his collection’s criteria.
The three men fought bitterly, exulting in each other’s failures. “Absolutely nothing has been found this week,” Tanucci wrote to Charles. “Alcubierre is triumphant.” Paderni, meanwhile, called Weber a “butcher of antiquity”. Visiting archaeologist Johann Joaquin Winckelmann was aghast. Paderni was “an imposter… a nitwit and an ignoramus”, he wrote; Alcubierre had “as much to do with antiquity as the moon with prawns”.
Pompeii wasn’t formally identified until 20 August 1763, when a travertine stele – Alcubierre called it a pedestal – was unearthed with an inscription dating it to the reign of Vespasian, the last decade of the city’s life.
There are, in fact, a series of such inscriptions around the city recording the work of Titus Suedius Clemens, tasked by the emperor with reclaiming public land that had been appropriated for private use. Clemens escaped the city’s destruction. It can’t have been many weeks after the eruption of Vesuvius that he carved his name on the Colossi of Memnon in Luxor, little thinking it would be Pompeii that made his name immortal.
This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the August 2023 issue of History Today.
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Mathew Lyons 
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